Evolution

by Stephen Baxter

  Ejan and Rocha followed an unknown coast. Eventually they reached a place where they could see a stream of what must be fresh water cutting out of the inland tangle of vegetation. They turned their craft to face the shore and paddled hard, until they felt the canoes’ prows grinding into the bed of the shallowing sea. They had landed on a strip of beach, fringed by dense, tangled forest.

  Rocha cried, “Me first, me first!” She leapt out of the dugout — or tried to; after a couple of days at sea, her legs gave way under her, and she slipped and fell on her backside in the water, laughing.

  It wasn’t a very dignified landing. Nobody made a speech or raised a flag. And there would be no monument here; in fact, in another thirty thousand years, this first landing site would be drowned by the rising sea. Nevertheless this was an extraordinary moment. For Rocha had become the first hominid ever to touch Australian soil, the first to set foot on the continent.

  Ejan clambered out more carefully. Then, knee-deep in the warm, coastal water, they dragged their canoes until they were firmly grounded.

  Rocha ran straight to the freshwater stream. She threw herself into it and rolled, sucking up great mouthfuls of it and scraping at her skin. “Ugh, the salt! I am caked in it.” With the exuberance of youth, she scrambled up the stream and into the fringe of forest, seeking fresh fruit.

  Ejan took a tremendous drink of the cold, crisp water, and immersed his head for long heartbeats. Then, his legs trembling, he walked up the beach. He studied the jungle. He recognized mangroves, palms; it was much as it had been at home. He wondered how far this new island stretched. And he wondered if there were, after all, people here.

  Rocha squealed softly. He hurried to her side.

  Through the tangle of vegetation something was moving. It was massive, yet it moved all but silently. It had a terrible reptilian stillness about it that evoked deep primal fears in their hearts. And now it came slithering out of the undergrowth. It was a snake, Ejan saw immediately, but a snake of a size he had never seen before. It was at least a pace across, and seven or eight paces long. Brother and sister grabbed each other and hurried from the forest, back to the beach.

  “Beasts,” Rocha whispered. “We have come to a land of mighty beasts.”

  They stared into each other’s eyes, panting, sweating. And then they started to laugh, their fear transmuting into exhilaration.

  They limped back to the canoe to retrieve their wood and make a fire, the first artificial fire this huge land had ever seen.

  But not the last.

  II

  Northwestern Australia. Circa 51,000 years before present.

  On a spit of rock-strewn beach, Jana had been gathering mussels. He was naked save for a belt from which dangled the net sacks containing his haul. His skin was deep brown, and his curly hair was piled on top of his head. At twenty-one he was slim, strong, tall, and very healthy — save for one slightly withered leg, the relic of a childhood brush with polio.

  Sweating, he looked up from his work. To the west the sun was making its daily descent into the ocean. If he shaded his eyes he could make out outriggers, and silhouettes made gaunt by the light off the sea: people, out on the water. The day was ending, and the bags at Jana’s waist were heavy.

  Enough. He turned and made his slow way back along the spit. As he walked, he limped slightly.

  All along the coast the people were returning home, attracted like moths to the threads of smoke that already climbed into the sky. People were crowded here, living in their dense little communities, feeding off the resources of the sea and the rivers.

  It had already been some fifty generations since the first human footfalls in Australia. Ejan and Rocha had returned home, bringing news of what they had found, and more had followed. And their descendants, still largely keeping to their shore-based and riverine economy, had spread around the coast of greater Australia, and along the rivers into the crimson plains of the interior. But Ejan and Rocha had been the first. Still their spirits were handed down from generation to generation — Jana himself bore the name and housed the soul of Ejan himself — and still the story of their crossing, how they had flown over the water on a boat lined with gull feathers, and had battled giant snakes and other monsters on landing, was told by the shamans in the firelit dark.

  Jana reached his home. His people lived in a cluster of lean-tos in the shelter of a heavily eroded sandstone bluff. The ground was crowded with the detritus of a seagoing folk: canoes, outriggers, and rafts had been hauled up on to the beach for the night, a dozen harpoons were stacked up against one another teepee-style, and nets, half-manufactured or half-repaired, lay heaped everywhere.

  In the open space at the center of the settlement, a large communal fire had been built of eucalyptus logs. Smaller fires burned in the cobble-lined hearths of the huts. Cooking stones had been placed in the big fires, and men, women, and older children were busy scaling and gutting fish. Younger children ran everywhere, making trouble and noise as children always did, acting as a glue of good humor that bound everybody together.

  But Jana couldn’t see Agema.

  Clutching his string bags, he made his way to the largest of the lean-tos. Agema shared this shelter with her parents — second cousins to Jana’s own parents — and her wide brood of siblings. Jana took a breath at the darkened entrance to the hut, gathered his courage, and then stepped into the lean-to. Inside there was much activity and a rich mixture of scents, of wood smoke, cured meat, babies, milk, sweat.

  Then he saw her. She was cleaning an infant, a tangle-haired little girl whose face was encrusted with snot.

  Jana held up his net bag. The mussels within glistened. “I brought you these,” he said. Agema looked up, and her mouth twitched in a smile, but she averted her eyes. The kid was staring at him, wide-eyed. Jana said, “They’re the best, I think. Maybe we could—”

  But now a foot shot out of the dark, catching his withered leg. It crumpled immediately, and he fell to the hard-trodden ground, spilling the mussels. He was surrounded by laughter. A strong hand grabbed his armpit and hauled him back to his feet.

  “If you want to impress her you shouldn’t try to walk, not with a leg like that. You ought to hop like a kangaroo.”

  Jana, his face burning, found himself staring into the deep, handsome eyes of Osu, Agema’s brother. More of her siblings surrounded him. Jana tried to control his anger. “You tripped me.”

  When Osu made out the genuine anger in Jana’s eyes his face clouded. “I didn’t mean disrespect,” he said gently.

  His decency only made it worse. Jana bent to pick up the mussels.

  Osu said, “Here, let me help.”

  Jana snapped, “I don’t need your help. They’re for—”

  “Ah. For my sister?” Osu looked up at the girl, and Jana saw him wink.

  Another of the brothers — Salo, impossibly tall, impossibly good-looking — stepped forward. “Look, fellow, if you want to impress her, this is what you ought to bring home.” And he showed Jana a mussel shell — a huge one, so big he needed two hands to hold it.

  Jana had never seen a mussel of such a size, not in a lifetime of gathering the mollusks — in fact nobody alive had seen such a giant. “Where did you find this?”

  Salo nodded vaguely. “Along the beach, in an old midden. I’m thinking of using it as a bowl.”

  Osu nodded. “Giant mussels, eh? Ejan and Rocha must have eaten well in those days. All gone now, of course. Bring back one of those, little kangaroo, and Agema will open her legs faster than a mussel on the fire opens its shell.”

  More laughter. Jana saw that Agema was hiding her face, but her shoulders were shaking. Again that uncontrollable anger surged, and Jana knew he had to get out of there before he behaved like a child by displaying his anger — or, even worse, by striking one of these infuriating brothers.

  He gathered up his mussels and got out with as much dignity as he could muster. But even as he left he could hear Osu’s gently mocking vo
ice: “I hear his dick is as bent as his leg.”

  Jana got very little sleep that night. But, as he lay awake, he knew what he had to do.

  He rose before dawn. He gathered up his ropes, fire-hardened spears, bow, arrows, and fire tools, and crept out of the encampment.

  Following the bank of a river, he worked his way inland.

  As Jana stepped silently across the dead matter of the forest floor, he disturbed a cluster of scurrying, rodentlike creatures. They were a kind of kangaroo. They peered at him with large, resentful eyes before fleeing. He barely noticed them as he pushed on.

  Many of the trees in the sparse riverbank forest were eucalyptus, wreathed by strips of half-shed bark. These peculiar trees, like much of the flora, were distant descendants of Gondwanaland vegetation, stranded when this raft continent had broken away from the other southern lands. And through the river water, shaded by the trees, cruised more relics of ancient times. They were crocodiles, rafted here like the eucalyptus — but unlike the trees, and like their cousins elsewhere, they were barely changed by time.

  He came to a clearing.

  A family of four-legged creatures the size of rhinos was working its way across the clearing. They had small ears, stubby tails, and they walked on flat feet, like bears. They were making a mess of the forest floor: With their tusklike lower teeth, they scraped steadily at the ground, seeking the salt bushes they favored. These herbivorous marsupials were diprotodons — a kind of giant wombat.

  There were many kinds of kangaroo here. Some of the smaller kinds searched for grass and low vegetation on the ground. But the larger ones were much taller than Jana; these giants had grown so tall so they could browse at the trees’ foliage. As they searched for food the kangaroos levered themselves forward using their forelegs, tails, and those powerful hind legs, a unique means of locomotion. They were slow and oddly graceful despite their size.

  But now, from the forest on the far side of the clearing, there was a roar. The kangaroos, large and small, turned and fled, bouncing away with their extraordinary elastic leaps. The originator of the roar loped casually into the clearing. It looked like a lion, but it was not a close relation of any cat. It was a thylacoleo — another marsupial, like the diprotodons and the kangaroos — but this one was a carnivorous predator, molded into its leonine form by identical opportunities and roles. The catlike creature moved with silky stealth around the clearing, its cold eyes studying its prey.

  Jana moved cautiously around the fringe of the clearing, eyeing the thylacoleo.

  While in the rest of the world the placental mammals had become dominant, Australia had become a continent-sized laboratory of marsupial adaptation. There were carnivorous kangaroos that hunted in ferocious, high-bounding packs. There were strange creatures unlike any elsewhere: huge relatives of the platypus, giant tortoises the size of family cars, land-going crocodiles. And in the forests walked immense monitor lizards — related to the komodo dragons of Asia, but much larger — an eerie Cretaceous memory, one-ton carnivorous lizards big enough to take out a kangaroo, or a human.

  Jana moved on, his thoughts far away.

  Jana had known Agema all her life, as she had known him; here in this tight community everybody knew everybody else. But it was only in the last year, as she had passed seventeen, that he had become so attracted to her. Even now he could not have said what it was about her that had so enthralled him. She was not tall, not very shapely, with breasts that would always be small, hips and buttocks too wide, and her face was a wide moon of flesh with a small nose and downturned mouth. But there was about her a quietness, like the quiet of the sea when your canoe was far from land, a stillness masking depths and richness.

  He had barely spoken to her of this. He had barely spoken to her at all, in fact, for a year, since becoming aware of her in this way.

  What really hurt was that Osu and those other braying idiots were right to goad him, to point up his limping, his unsuitability as a husband for Agema. They were trying to protect their sister from a poor match. He knew that his damaged leg was no real impediment to his making a living, to his being able to help Agema raise the kids he wanted to share with her so badly, but what he had to do was convince her and her family of that.

  And he was never going to do that by scraping mussels off rocks like a child. He was going to have to hunt, that was all. He was going to have to go out and bring home some big game — and he would have to do it alone, so he could prove to Agema and the rest that he was as strong, resourceful, and capable as any man.

  The bulk of the people’s food came from hunting small creatures or just simple foraging, in the sea, the river, and the coastal strip of forest: straightforward, low-risk, unspectacular stuff. Hunting bigger prey was pretty much a male preserve, a risky game that gave men and boys the chance to show off their fitness, just as it always had. And this ancient game was what Jana was going to have to play now.

  Of course he wasn’t foolish enough to take on anything too massive alone. The largest animals could be brought down only by a cooperative hunt. But there was one target that a solo hunter could bring home.

  He kept walking, heading deeper into the forest.

  At length he came to another clearing. And here he spotted what he wanted.

  He had found a nest of roughly assembled foliage inside of which a dozen eggs had been carefully arranged. What made the nest extraordinary was its size — probably Jana himself could have laid down inside it — and some of those eggs were as big as Jana’s skull. Purga, if she could have seen this tremendous structure, might have believed that the dinosaurs had indeed returned.

  Jana laid his trap with skill. He scouted around the clearing until he spotted the mother bird’s huge splay-footed tracks. He followed the tracks a little way into the forest. Then he strung ropes between the trees across the tracks, and he took his double-pointed spears and rammed them into the ground.

  After that, it was time to set the fire.

  It was quick work to gather bits of dry wood. To create a flame he used a tiny bow to rotate a stick of wood in a socket in a small log. He nursed the blaze with bits of kindling. When the fire had caught he thrust torches into the flames, and hurled them around the forest.

  Everywhere the torches landed, flames blossomed like deadly flowers.

  Birds rose with a shriek, fleeing the rising smoke, and ratty little kangaroos scurried at his feet, their eyes wide with alarm. By the time he had retreated to the clearing the flames were spreading, the separate pockets of fire joining up.

  At last a huge bipedal form came screeching out of the forest. She bristled with dark feathers, her head held up on a long neck, and her muscular legs seemed to make the ground shake as she ran. She was a genyornis, a giant flightless bird twice the size of an emu. In fact she was one of the largest birds that would ever live. But she was terrified, Jana could see that: her eyes were wide; her startlingly small beak gaped.

  And the bird’s great feet caught in his rope. She plummeted forward toward the ground. Her own momentum skewered her neatly on Jana’s spear. She did not die immediately. Trapped, the bloody spear protruding from her back, the genyornis flapped her feeble, useless wings. A deep part of her awareness experienced a kind of regret that her remote ancestors had given up the gift of the air. But now here was a capering, yelling hominid, and an ax that fell.

  The flames were spreading. Jana was going to have to hurry his butchery and get out of here.

  There had been fires in Australia before the arrival of humans, of course. They had come mostly in the monsoon season, when there were many lightning strikes. Some fire-resistant species of plants had developed in response. But they were not widespread or dominant.

  But now things were changing. Everywhere they went the people burned, to encourage the growth of edible plants and to drive out game. The vegetation had already begun to adapt. Grasses, as hardy and prevalent as they were everywhere, were able to burn fiercely and yet survive. Candlebark eucaly
ptus trees had actually evolved to carry flame; bits of bark would break off and, borne by the wind, ignite new blazes tens of kilometers away. But for each winner there were many, many losers. The more fire-sensitive woody plants couldn’t compete in the new conditions. Cypress pines, which had once been prevalent, were becoming rare. Even some plants prized by the people as food sources, like some fruiting shrubs, were extinguished. And as their habitats were scorched, animal communities imploded.

  From Ejan’s original pinprick landing site, people were diffusing out, generation by generation, along the coasts and river courses. It was as if a great wave of fire and smoke were spreading out from Australia’s northwestern fringe, working across the interior of this vast red land. And before this front of destruction, the old life succumbed. The loss of the giant mussels had been just the first of the extinctions.

  As Jana left the forest the fire still blazed, spreading rapidly, and great pillars of smoke towered into the sky. Uninterested, he did not turn back.

  He could not carry the whole bird home, of course. But then, bringing back food wasn’t really the point. And when Jana walked into his camp with the genyornis’s head mounted on a spear, he was gratified by the slaps of approval from Osu and the others — and by the shy acceptance of his gifts by Agema.

  III

  New South Wales, Australia. Circa 47,000 years before present.

  The bark canoe sat motionless on the lake’s murky water.

  Jo’on and his wife, Leda, were fishing. Jo’on was standing up, holding his spear ready for the fish. The spear was tipped with wallaby bone, ground sharp and set in gum resin. Leda had made her line from pounded bark fiber, and had fitted it with a hook made from a bit of shell. But the hooks were brittle, the line weak, so Leda’s intention was to lead in a hooked fish as gently as possible, while Jo’on stood ready to spear it.

  Jo’on was forty years old. He was scrawny, but his wrinkled face was good-humored, though lined by a lifetime of hard work. And he was proud of his boat.